The yellow canary in the window at Connersmith is cleanly sculpted, rendered by Scottish artist Kenny Hunter with the elementary lines and primary color of a cartoon. Just one thing is little off. The bird is dead.
The juxtaposition of innocent form and ominous subject is one of the things that links Hunter with Welsh-born Julie Roberts, the other artist in “Nothing Lasts Forever.” (Another is that they studied together at the Glasgow School of Art in the late 1980s.) Roberts’s oils and watercolors focus on children, and their neutral, sepia-tinged look suggests both old photographs and young-adult book illustrations. Her “difficult pre-school years [were] occasionally spent in institutional care,” the artist writes, which spurs her to depict kids in orphanages and worse: “Ghetto Boy” wears a yellow, six-point star and has his hands up, as if about to be seized by the Gestapo.
(Courtesy of Judy Jashinsky and Civilian Art Projects/Courtesy of Judy Jashinsky and Civilian Art Projects) - HANDOUT: \"The President Returns,\" 2005. Image courtesy of Judy Jashinsky and Civilian Art Projects.
(Courtesy of Judy Jashinsky and Civilian Art Projects) - Judy Jashinsky. \"Kazakhstani Hunter with Falcon,\" 2005.
Not all the news in Roberts’s pictures is bad. One of her paintings portrays two boys who have ridden the Kindertransport from Nazi-controlled Europe to safety in Britain. But, of course, the children have left their families behind and in all likelihood will be orphans soon themselves. Other pictures depict swastikas and explosions, all in a world where adults’ menacing handiwork is more evident than their actual presence.
Roberts’s paintings are precisely composed and sometimes feature large voids in the foreground, such as the dirt road in “Orphan Village” or the floor in “Workhouse (Male Ward).” The muted colors are occasionally brightened by bands of sunlight, and a close look reveals thickly textured pigment that belies the simplicity of the images. It turns out that there’s as much tension within Roberts’s style as between that style and her vision of childhood.
Only one of Hunter’s sculptures shows a kid, a full-sized boy holding a rifle that’s almost as tall as he is. The tyke, like most of these pieces, is made from white polyester and acrylic resin, materials that are even more blank than Roberts’s technique. The affinities between the two artists’ works include specific poses; both show figures who are kneeling in prayer. But the fundamental one is the deadpan demeanor with which each depicts life in a coal mine where the canary has already died.
Judy Jashinsky
Roberts was born in 1963, after the historical events depicted in her paintings. Judy Jashinsky, however, lived through the period she chronicles in “13 Days + 13 Nights, 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis,” her show at Civilian Arts Projects. In fact, a painting of her as a Wisconsin high school freshman is included among the many portraits, which range from Castro, Krushchev and two Kennedys to Bob Dylan and Washington socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was romantically linked to JFK and murdered mysteriously in Georgetown about a year after the American-Soviet showdown. The personal is political indeed.
A realist painter with classical technique, Jashinsky is known for thematic series that can overlap. Her missile crisis exhibition includes “Caribbean Storm,” a large 1992 painting that was originally part of a “Columbus and Isabella” sequence. But most of the pieces here are small and photo-derived, grouped in stylistically linked sets. The portraits that include the artist’s own are in oil on wood, with a lighter palette; pictures apparently modeled on newspaper halftones are in conte, gesso and acrylic and often blue-tinted.
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